A curious mixture: but that's the man."

"How awful!" murmured Nitocris. "Fancy a man like that being in such a
position!"

But, although she did not understand why, she had heard his
harshly-spoken words with a positive sense of relief. They exactly
translated and crystallised her first inexplicable feelings of desperate
aversion--almost of terror.

She led Leighton to a little group on the left side of the lawn,
composed of the three Professors and the wives and daughters of two of
them. As they approached them, Nitocris became sensible of a curious
kind of nervousness. She did not know that by this commonplace action
she was reuniting two links in a long-severed chain of destiny, but she
had a dim consciousness that she was going to do something much more
important than merely introducing two strangers to each other. She
looked quite anxiously at Brenda, who had turned towards them as they
came near, and saw that, just for the fraction of a second, her eyes
brightened, and a passing flush deepened the delicate colour in her
cheeks. It was almost like a glance of recognition, and yet she had only
heard his name two or three times, and certainly had never seen him
before. Then she looked swiftly at Leighton. Yes, there was a flush
under his tan and a new light in his eyes. When she had completed the
introductions she looked away for a moment, and said in her soul:

"Thank goodness! If that is not a case of love at first sight, I shan't
believe that there is any such thing, whatever the poets and romancers
may say."

Yes, her womanly intuition was right as far as it reached; but she could
not yet grasp the full meaning of the marvel which she had helped to
bring about. With her father, she believed in the Doctrine of
Re-Incarnation as the only one which affords a logical and entirely just
solution of the bewildering puzzles and ghastly problems of human life
as seen by the eyes of ignorance. She had grasped in its highest meaning
the truth--that Man is really a living soul, living from eternity to
eternity. An immortality with one end to it was to her an unthinkable
proposition which could not possibly be true. For her, as for her
father, Eternal Life and Eternal Justice were one. Where a man ended one
life, from that point he began the next: for good or for evil, for
ignorance or for knowledge. A life lived and ended in righteousness
(not, of course, in the narrow theological sense of the term) began
again in r